Skip to content

From a TDE Reader: "Just recalled this after reading your D.H. Lawrence post - his poem "A Sane Revolution," which was on the inner cover of my older brother's Mott the Hoople album in the '70s."

A Sane Revolution

If you make a revolution, make it for fun,
don't make it in ghastly seriousness,
don't do it in deadly earnest,
do it for fun.

Don't do it because you hate people,
do it just to spit in their eye.

Don't do it for the money,
do it and be damned to the money.

Don't do it for equality,
do it because we've got too much equality
and it would be fun to upset the apple-cart
and see which way the apples would go a-rolling.

Don't do it for the working classes.
Do it so that we can all of us be little aristocracies on our own
and kick our heels like jolly escaped asses.

Don't do it, anyhow, for international Labour.
Labour is the one thing a man has had too much of.
Let's abolish labour, let's have done with labouring!
Work can be fun, and men can enjoy it; then it's not labour.
Let's have it so! Let's make a revolution for fun!

I hate to say it, but there's some mild Chesterton running throughout this and, although I can't say I agree with it, I far prefer its sentiments to the sentiments of every other revolution I've read about.

Comments

Latest